Chapter 1 SLAVERY, ECONOMY & PHILOSOPHY - CITY-STATES & EMPIRE IN MEDITERRANEAN ANTIQUITIES by Debabrata Banerjee the chapter opens with a Map of the Agora of Megara Hyblaea, (from G. Vallet - F. Villard -P. Auberson, Megara Hyblaea 1Le quartier de l’agora archaïque which I cannot upload on this computer.) 1.1 Slavery, Economy, Democracy and Intellection in Historical Contexts & Theory – Outlining Space-Time Constellations 1 How could Greco-Roman Antiquity invent philosophy and politics; how could they invent monuments that so perfectly embodied those values, and at the same time make men fight in amphitheatre or reduce a portion of humanity to slavery? The Slave, Yvon Thebert Strife is no only child. Upon the earth Two strifes exist; the one is praised by those Who come to know her and the other blamed. Their nature differs: for the cruel one Makes battles thrive, and war; she wins no love …. The other first-born child of blackest night Was set by Zeus, who lives in air, on high, Set in the roots of the earth, an aid to men She urges even lazy men to work …So neighbor vies with neighbor in their rush For wealth: this strife is good for mortal men Hesiod, Works and Days This chapter proposes the need of overhauling for grasping the qualitative dimension of the ancient world by re-definition of social forms of labour and `enquiries’ in the realm of comprehension in Mediterranean antiquities, while restraining from exaggerated essentialist interpretations, which has been the hallmark in the study of slavery in the ancient world. The ancient mentalite regarded the quantifier, whose arche has been located in ancient Mesopotamian conception of arithmetic by Denise Schmandt-Besserat approximating the origin of written language in ancient Mediterranean, as a generic unit, a symbol of both `pure’ un-quantified, yet arithmetical i.e., quantifiable qualifier co-abstracted together with the multitude of abstract, generic un-quantified qualifiers, or a symbolization of both an abstract generic quantifier and also an abstract generic qualifier. Deciphering the Elamite and Babylonian Cuneiform made substantial progress between 1840 and 1850 with the find that their signs could have a phonetic value [ a sign=a syllable] or an ideographic value [ a sign=a word], which laid down the basic principles. Later it was discovered that the ideograms came from a very ancient language – Sumerian. The Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform documentation represents a considerable body of texts touching on nearly every field. The scientific literature, for its part, often adopted a form of a list, revealing their desire to catalogue their environment in most material and spiritual aspects. But it defined the scientific field – law, medicine, mathematics, etc. - `rub shoulders with divination, astrology and magical conjuration’. Scientific literature was therefore closely linked with religious literature which set down in writing `rituals and different types of prayers.’ [all footnotes omitted - anandi.] The math corresponding to this mentalite is therefore, quanto-qualitative, whose generic unit , is a quantifiable qualifier, called by Plato, the arithmoi monadikoi, expressed by notations that fully developed around 250 AD in the Arithmetike of Diophantus[ elision of qualifiers]. Modern mentalite , steeped pervasively in the experiences of exchange-value based exchanges than were those of ancient Mediterranean, is more comfortable with the `hyper-abstractness’ of abstracting pure unqualified quantifiers [ by using a set of ten symbols] thereby eliding quality, even though modern arithmetic has expanded ideo-ontologically like ancient arithmetic by including 0 and 1 as numbers. But abstract quantity is founded on the nonlinearity barrier, which is not found in the `prehistory’ of arithmetic – from iconic tokenology to Cuneiform literacy. An analysis of modern reification and fetishism arises out of ignorance of modern pseudo-subjectivity. These are some reasons why Marx would emphasize the stress lain on use-value, rather than exchange-value, by the writers of antiquity [especially Plato] while discussing division of labour . If the growth of quantity is occasionally mentioned, `this is only done with the greater abundance of use values. There is not a word alluding to exchange value…This standpoint, the standpoint is adopted by Plato’ who treats `division of labour within the community’ develops from `the many sidedness of the needs of individuals and one-sidedness of their capabilities.` The main point here is that labourer must adapt himself to work, not the work to the labourer’.` That is because work will not wait for the leisure of the and the workman should attend to it as his own affair.’ At another level interpreting Aristotle, Marx says that Aristotle could not extract abstract-homogeneous labour, that in the form of commodity values, all labour is expressed as equal human labour and therefore equal quality by inspection of the form of value because Greek society was founded on the labour of the slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and labour power. We are talking about historical epochs when consciousness mattered far more than it does in the modern historical phase though a form of self-expanding and `evoluting’ consciousness was seen to have the capacity to bring about major changes to the extent in which it could appear as a real force. `Considered ideally, the dissolution of a given form of consciousness sufficed to kill a whole epoch.’1 It was symbolic that the town of Hurran Carrhae, in upper Mesopotamia gave refuge to the last representatives of paganism – the Neo-Platonic philosophers whom Christianity had expelled from Athens in late 5th c. AD. As opposed to the position of Weber and more reworked ideas along similar lines of Finley, there are no assumptions in this study about `ancient economy’, such as an `economy `embedded’ within cultural constraints, or Finley’s view that `classical Greeks’ had `no concept of economy at all, when the emphasis was on social, and political `status’, as contrasted with modern capitalist economic sector, as historicized by Hasebrock and Polyani, who contrast ethnographic accounts to conclude that in the earliest societies `there is an absence of any institution based on economic motive’. The Greco-Roman world is defined, or reduced to it essence [Husserl] as `slave society/s’, predominantly natural /subsistence based rural landscapes interspersed with large estates of absentee landlords, especially in the Roman world who used slaves as a differentiated strata, not limited to urban/rural distinction. In these works there obtains specificity or particularity, which simultaneously provides the alibi for generating historicist illusions culled out of a broad spectrum of records for the sake of proof or validations. While noting that though recent increase in works on slavery cover not only the `autonomous’, detailed examination of almost all aspects of slavery but also `comprehensive coverage’ and attempts at `synthesis’ at varying levels, analysis of family situation and living conditions influenced by such contemporary preoccupation with studying mentalities, none of the beliefs, assumptions and methodologies of a vast body of studies have more than some minor overlaps in our study/work. This work enquires into the complexity, the `verticality’ / depth of natural, naive or ancient consciousness does without attempting to resolve the problems of ancient slavery through attempts to clarify the vertical in terms of horizontal in a projected `intentional’ register, where the concept of region demands the concept of horizon and a field of objects appears before a subject. The subject in the Greek world was implicit and Greek individuality cannot be found in `regions’ with its boundaries and limits lined with slaves. The Greeks were mainly caught between the `individuality’ of their anthropological discourse and the subject of phenomenology, turned inwards, as with the Socratic tradition, which was also an aspect of the decline of the `Greek world’. We draw upon Merleu-Ponty’s critique of Husserl, who while founded/constituted epoche [reduction] a step in right direction, an advance over Descartes and Kantian approach to nature, but missed out something regarding the relationship between natural and transcendental attitudes. What is missing is a `tissue’ connecting the natural and transcendental attitude. Thus Husserl does not complete the `region of pure consciousness’ in `Ideen’4 . In such a region, a subject without intended objects is just off-base or limited by the idiom of layers, beset with the priority of intentionality. Naïve or natural consciousness is not so bounded in the dialectical form, which shows the transcendence of pre-critical understanding within and beyond the verticality of natural experience. The `lower’ and `higher’ gravitate around one another as high/low variants of the side/other-side variation. As Merleau-Ponty says so clearly, `I bring the high low distinction into the vortex where it joins the side/other-side distinction, where the two distinctions are integrated into a universal dimensionality’ for understanding something like Hegel’s spirit that is active both as self-diremption [ involution] and self-transcendence [evolution].5This re-signifies the self-active concept because it is spirit’s own activity, which is grasped in ancient dialectic in the first place as both preserving and transcending < sublation>. The argument is that slavery was not the sole but the defining form or the flesh of labour determination in terms of historical emergence and duration whose visibility and noise does not obfuscate side/other-side relations of labour, though its reduction to binary, keeping high/low apart may correspond to the invisible presence and the apparent silence of ruling consciousness on the economy. When we speak of the flesh of visibility, this is not meant to do anthropology, but to indicate a prototype of our body-subjectivity where the sensible and sentient is the most exemplary. Slavery and economy existed as concepts of `objectivity’, experience and facticity. Philosophy and forms of knowledge examined their facticity of existence in a layer of the vertical reality of classified / hierarchical historical societies, situated in depths and layered by other surfaces thus rendering them opaque. Philosophy as dialectical self-interrogation can only show how the world is articulated by starting with the body-subject, which is not nothingness and by installing itself at its edge, which is neither in or for itself, but are joints [ so central to Plato’s dialectic] where the multiple entities of the world cross. Let us take a look at the form that work took in the Ancient world, in terms of their self-consciousness. How was work defined in relation to other human activities? In the first place, the Greeks had no term corresponding to `work’. A word such as `ponos’ is applied to any activity involving laborious effort, not simply to productive tasks that are socially useful i.e it is a. a simple abstraction. The word `ergazesthai’ was applied to two sectors of human life : 1/ farming or laboring in the fields [ to erga] and 2/ in complete contrast, financial activity [ ergasia chrematon], earning interest from capital. Nevertheless, the term also used to describe to `any activity in its most general form’1 Going beyond the simple, natural activity or conditions of labour in general, arate also refers to the product of an artisan – or an activity that is similar to poiein, i.e., technological manufacture, not necessarily as artifacts, and opposed to prattein, whose end is not to make an external object separate from the act of production’, but to perform an action in order to disclose what is hidden in nature. However Aristotle translates this disclosure as techne, or in technical terms, he creates an artificial area. But this is not the sole definitive view, for techne or technical terms also hide nature. There is a level of `invisibility’ of both techne and nature, or something incomplete, which raises the question: to what extent is nature active therein? This is not the way Vernant formulates the problem, but perhaps the Greek notion of activity, as the relation between technology and nature gave rise to the term `bios’ and artifacts. It is also possible that the Greeks at a certain period [certainly with Plato] the notion of `mixing’ the natural and artificial was put as a question. The answer or the solution to such a problem may be emerging later in the 20th c., in the form of `bio-facts’. In Aristotelian terms all that grows is natural while technology impacts from the outside, its movement concerns causality. Next is the physical concept of the shape – from the shape plant is of nature, or nature is a plant. But the shape would become a bio-fact with inserted genes with their bio-information. They also grow but not automatically. Yet there is a phenomenal identity with conventional plants. The public is not told about the imitation or resemblance since what is stressed straightaway is natural production. Bt. Corn looks as it always looked, but what is new is the supply of greater yields, which is not a novelty but a function. This makes the Aristotalian view of nature disappear from the production of Bt products .and the term techne [technology] becomes unclear because it is no artifact in the sense of its past. A grey area opens up between nature and technology as their nature and `things’ [beings] no longer appears clear. Humans need to subject bio-facts to itself with restraint, 2 This could be the reason why Plato prohibited any practical application of his theories [including geometry], while the Neo-Platonist went into application ad experiments, discoveries without much haste and with restraint. What remains is mostly theoretical, nothing much practical or artifacts. Vernant talks about two `uses’ of the word `ergon’: to mark the accomplishment of praxis and the product of the creative work of the artisan [ a poietic] Plato also clarifies the distinction between doing and making –prattein and poienin – through Critias.3 .In their times, Homer and Hesiod did not use these terms to refer to an artisan as a worker or a producer, but defined all activities outside of oikos for the benefit of demos. It referred not only to artisans, carpenters or blacksmith but also bards, diviners and heralds who did not produce anything material at all. According to Vernant, such linguistic evidence suggests that among the activities constituting the `single complex of working behaviours, there are different levels, multiple aspects and even oppositions.4 No generalized, instead of `true’ as Vernant has it, concept of work existed. Agriculture is not considered a trade any more than waging war. `Can it be called a techne?, asks Vernant. We have argued before, from the standpoint of our age of bio-technology and bio-facts that it could well have been regarded as such but Vernant takes a typical Aristotelian inspired `official’ modern view; in his interpretation techne `implies specialized knowledge, apprenticeship and secret [?] ways to ensure success.’5 Surely this is a moribund and a demeaning view of the agricultural practices of our ancient ancestors who selected, domesticated, hybridized and bred many cereals, animal and vegetable aggregates that continue to form the basis of dietary habits, ever since till the modern age. Thus one wonders whether Verant produces a brief from Xenophon, who Marx thought had characteristic bourgeois instincts, to the effect that Xenophon’s `descriptions of sowing, breeding, harvesting, thrashing, winnowing and cultivation of fruit trees are aimed showing not human skills but nature at work.’6 According to Vernant, work is participation in an `order both natural and divine’, which seems closer to the Mesopotamian view, which is `superior to men.’ He theologizes work, which makes limited sense by comparing work to divine necessity, as merit in the most general sense. For Vernant, though `this theme counterbalances the assertion of the supremacy of pure thought over action in Greek moral speculation’. This view is essentially incorrect, said without citing any evidence, since the division of mental and manual labour was explicit in Greek `slave/ menial labour society. The citizen stood apart from any manual labour, which was the rationale behind the Greek city-state/ polis. Turning to agriculture, Vernant thinks that n `this type of agriculture’ there was little evidence of economic aspect of work [whatever that means] as there is of `its instrumental and technical sides, since oikos is supposed to provide for all needs of the family, self- sufficiency remains an ideal for peasant life’. This makes nothing out of the Greek economy and big markets [as in Athens] for some cereals, vegetables, pickles, sea-food and fruits. Vernat seems to interpret more in the lines of what Marx described as oriental communes, rather than Greek polis.. Actually there is very little point in perusing Vernant’s arguments on this score. [next: Basic Greek political Trajectory – Theseus and Solon]
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 09:38:59 +0000
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